Meaning Analysis of Inflected Words.

Two hypotheses concerning the meaning analysis of written inflected words were tested: Either analysis is governed by the stem, or the stem and the suffix receive simultaneous semantic analysis. The method involved a new semantic decision (picture-written word matching) paradigm utilizing the spatial information carried by Finnish locative case endings. Results supported the first hypothesis. In contrast to certain claims in the recent morphological processing literature, suffix-related semantic information is secondary to the stem and it becomes available later than stem-related semantic information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]